History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

Well they are synonyms, and very rarely are synonyms full, as in covering every sense or use of its synonyms. But they might also be different words altogether, whose meaning is of a meeting of men for this or that purpose, the same way a party and a committee are meetings of people but they are nowhere near synonymous.

These recent linguistic discussion has got me wondering: how exactly do we know how people pronounced words in the past? Even with languages which still exist (e.g. Latin), what makes us think that pronunciation hasn't changed in the last millennia or two to the extent people can discuss how Romans pronounced words?

There are a couple of ways. An important one is borrowings - so 'Caesar' is always written Καισαρ in Greek, we know that the Greek K is pronounced as a hard C and αι as I (as in the first sound of 'ice'), so we know that 'Caesar' was pronounced 'kai-sar' rather than 'seezer'. Another one is poetry, where certain vowels being long or short, and certain letters (such as h whenever it appears at the start of a word, and often -em, -um, -am at the end of a word) being silent, is essential to making the metre work.

There are even a couple of Roman scholars who actually tell us how words are pronounced - for example, a 4th century grammarian actually tells us that R was pronounced with a trill, like it is in French. Then there are the mistakes people make when trying to write unintuitive spellings - for example, words like 'virum' ending in -um, -am, -em are often written as 'viro', which suggests that the last syllable was more of a grunt than pronounced as it was written. For later Latin, we can use how the words developed in Romance languages as well.

There's a book called Vox Latina which makes this its subject - I flicked through it a while ago but didn't actually buy it, so am working from memory here.

Flying Pig said:

There are a couple of ways. An important one is borrowings - so 'Caesar' is always written Καισαρ in Greek, we know that the Greek K is pronounced as a hard C and αι as I (as in the first sound of 'ice'), so we know that 'Caesar' was pronounced 'kai-sar' rather than 'seezer'.

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Maybe I'm just being stupid, but for me this just raises the same question again: how do we know that the Greek K at the time was hard? I mean, sure, it might be now, but how do we know it hasn't changed in 2000 years?

Another one is poetry, where certain vowels being long or short, and certain letters (such as h whenever it appears at the start of a word, and often -em, -um, -am at the end of a word) being silent, is essential to making the metre work.

There are even a couple of Roman scholars who actually tell us how words are pronounced - for example, a 4th century grammarian actually tells us that R was pronounced with a trill, like it is in French. Then there are the mistakes people make when trying to write unintuitive spellings - for example, words like 'virum' ending in -um, -am, -em are often written as 'viro', which suggests that the last syllable was more of a grunt than pronounced as it was written. For later Latin, we can use how the words developed in Romance languages as well.

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These things make a lot more sense as an argument to me than the previous. Thanks for pointing them out.

There's a book called Vox Latina which makes this its subject - I flicked through it a while ago but didn't actually buy it, so am working from memory here.

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Looks interesting. If I can find a library copy I might well check it out, (£20 is probably a bit too much for me to spend on answering an idle curiosity at the present).

Aren't these threads supposed to last only fifty pages?

Flying Pig said:

There are even a couple of Roman scholars who actually tell us how words are pronounced - for example, a 4th century grammarian actually tells us that R was pronounced with a trill, like it is in French. Then there are the mistakes people make when trying to write unintuitive spellings - for example, words like 'virum' ending in -um, -am, -em are often written as 'viro', which suggests that the last syllable was more of a grunt than pronounced as it was written. For later Latin, we can use how the words developed in Romance languages as well.

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Without any previous knowledge on Latin phonology, writing -um as -o might be due to the vowel becoming nasalised. The u sound (as in book), is rounded, and m is a bilabial consonant, so it makes sense. Velar glides, bilabials, and rounded vowels all have messy relationships. In Spanish, for example, b (e.g. abuelo/grandfather) is a bilabial fricative that is sometimes pronounced as the velar glide w, which is transliterated as gu (gü is followed by e or i, thence 'agüelo').

PhroX said:

Maybe I'm just being stupid, but for me this just raises the same question again: how do we know that the Greek K at the time was hard? I mean, sure, it might be now, but how do we know it hasn't changed in 2000 years?

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In this particular case, I'm fairly sure there are texts setting out the difference, in particular between κ and χ, which are unaspirated and aspirated respectively. More broadly, though, sound changes over time follow particular and predictable rules, and it wouldn't work with the patterns that actually happened to have every κ in Greek replaced with a soft c, and would need a lot of highly odd borrowings to have turned a soft c into a hard one. For example, English and other languages' words 'ecclesiastical' (and similar) hinge on the Greek word ἐκκλησία being pronounced with hard κ, and we would also have to ask why it wasn't written ἐσσλησία. In English and a lot of modern languages, there are a lot of ways to write the same sound. In ancient languages, that's generally not the case, because writing is far less standardised and far more done by intuition. There are other sorts of evidence, such as people trying to write down animal noises - in one case, I think Aristophanes gives a sheep's bleat as βή, βή, βή, which proves fairly conclusively on its own that Ancient Greek β was not pronounced V as it is today. In other cases, you need certain words to sound similar or puns don't work. The whole edifice is actually quite complex and rests on an awful lot of joined-up fragments of evidence - it took several centuries to put together.

Mouthwash - yes, they are, or at least 1000 replies. JohannaK, you actually made the 1000th, so the theoretical right to start a new one is with you.

Arakhor said:

If concilium and consilium were both Latin words for the same concept, would you say that's evidence for the softening of the C sound to have been happening even in Late Latin?

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Not in itself, no. as Flying Pig already pointed out the words had different meanings as well as different pronunciations.

That said, pronunciations do change over time. For instance, Russia is derived from Kiev Rus. Russians call their country Rossiya, however. There are countless other examples, sometimes even leading to letters changing place, such as in the German e-i Wechsel. As just mentioned below, there are even rules for these changes.

Ajidica said:

I'm with FP, 30 Years War hands down. If you lived in a smaller German farming village you were unlikely to have any direct experience with the Allied militaries until 1945. Allied soldiers -even Soviet soldiers despite their poor reputation- were supplied through a reasonably effective logistics corps which is a far cry from the "find the nearest farm and steal their pigs" school of logistics practiced during the 30 Year War. Plus, the 30 Years War did last Thirty Years. Even if people weren't as effective and murdering and pillaging in 1640 they had a lot more time to do it.

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If you lived in a smaller German farming village you were not a representative part of the German population in 1945.

The overwhelming majority of the demographic effect of the era of the Thirty Years' War in Germany is related to a couple of things that are only tangentially associated with military operations. First is the role of disease, which was often (but not always) spread by troops and, when not by troops, by refugees from fighting. Disease, as it did in virtually every premodern war, was the big killer, killing 3 soldiers for every 1 who died fighting or of wounds. The second thing, malnourishment, exacerbated disease. It was primarily caused by relatively poor harvests from 1619 to 1628 and made significantly worse by the Habsburg hyperinflation in the early 1620s, which eroded purchasing power and made it much more difficult for urbanites to acquire food. Military contributions and raiding were both relevant, but minor compared to the economic crisis of the 1620s.

Obviously, both of these things were made worse by the war, but it's not clear how worse. Modern authors have pointed out that mortality rates in early modern Europe were high anyway. Furthermore, the aforementioned migration and severe holes in early modern record-keeping make it extremely likely that many of the individuals who disappear from territorial registers simply moved somewhere else and stayed there. In Germany, population declines were usually localized and irregular (things like the total depopulation of Magdeburg were extremely uncommon), and most attempts to aggregate them without accounting for holes in the data have severely overestimated death rates (and compounded that by neglecting to compare them to peacetime mortality rates).

Many sources agree that, in general (again, demographic estimates already had high error before the methodological issue of migration was raised), Germany's population did not reach the level of 1618 until about 1710-20. It is not clear that this can be primarily associated with the Thirty Years' War, because rather than an era of peace in central Europe - as with the century before the war - there was an era of war. One suspects that things like the devastation of the Rhineland by Louis XIV's armies explain a great deal of the slow recovery. By comparison, after the Second World War, West Germany enjoyed an extended period of peace, security, immigration, and investment.

Sussing out whether the TYW or WWII was more "devastating" to Germany's population and economy is, at any rate, a very complicated endeavor, and like many other areas of history, what we actually know about the human and material costs, and what we can safely attribute to the war itself, are both more circumscribed than we might think.

Flying Pig said:

Mouthwash - yes, they are, or at least 1000 replies. JohannaK, you actually made the 1000th, so the theoretical right to start a new one is with you.

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Aw. I thought that there were no technical grounds forcing thread consolidation anymore.

Oh, I completely missed that. Anyway it is Jackelgull who has the 1000th post, I just have the 1000th reply.

Was there any real possibility of Mexico avoiding the war with the United States and retaining its northern territories, or were they doomed from the start by American immigrants?

Mexican control of Texas was pretty much doomed from the start. But Mexico chose the war. The US offered them an out short of war, and they rejected it.

Texas, certainly, and perhaps California. But there was an awful lot more to the territory taken from Mexico in 1848. Mexican control had always been weak in its north, but the main players in the conflicts before 1846 were the Apaches, the Comanche and the Mexican state - neither of whom could be described as likely American sympathisers. Indeed, the territory also contained Deseret - the future Utah - populated by people who had actively tried to escape the US government! It also wasn't totally out of the question that at least part of California would be colonised and annexed by Britain, until the Peel government rejected the idea: a good part of the local population were in favour of it. The reason that America held onto the region was less because it was fervently behind the US, and more that it was so far from the Mexican heartland and so generally worn down by decades of conflict and weak government that nobody, in the area or in Mexico, really had the energy to want to argue.

Flying Pig said:

The reason that America held onto the region was less because it was fervently behind the US, and more that it was so far from the Mexican heartland and so generally worn down by decades of conflict and weak government that nobody, in the area or in Mexico, really had the energy to want to argue.

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That's sounding suspiciously like geographical determinism there, Mr. Pig. Shall I get the pitchforks?

That isn't geographical determinism

Mouthwash said:

That's sounding suspiciously like geographical determinism there, Mr. Pig. Shall I get the pitchforks?

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Hm. I see what you mean, but I don't agree. No doubt geography played some part, but the vast majority of factors were human and based on the specific situation. I wasn't arguing that no country could ever control the American southwest, or that a government 700 miles away in Mexico City was fundamentally too far away to control San Antonio, but that was not true of one 1,400 miles away in Washington DC. It's true that it's difficult to see how Mexico could ever have exerted a large direct rule or control by force at that distance, or indeed how the United States could have done - and the events of the early 1860s proved that it could not. However, that isn't to say that geography made the re-alignment inevitable. Had there not been a regular string of wars between the Native tribes and the Mexican states through the decades leading to 1846, had there been much greater British or Mexican immigration to the Pacific coast than American, or had the Louisiana Purchase fallen through, the Mexican-American war might never had happened, or the factors might have worked in the opposite direction.

After Justinian, were there any plans for the Romans to reconquer their own provinces or were they simply content with what they had at the time? I know the Byzantines waxed and waned over the centuries but did they ever plan to retake the old empire?

Regards

Phrossack said:

Was there any real possibility of Mexico avoiding the war with the United States and retaining its northern territories, or were they doomed from the start by American immigrants?

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According to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, the war was a complete fabrication by the US. Hard to avoid.

salty mud said:

After Justinian, were there any plans for the Romans to reconquer their own provinces or were they simply content with what they had at the time? I know the Byzantines waxed and waned over the centuries but did they ever plan to retake the old empire?

Regards

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Most of Byzantine history post-Justinian is a story of trying (and gradually failing) to keep the provinces they already had. It also depends on who you call 'the Romans'. You can certainly read Leo's coronation of Charlemagne as 'Roman Emperor' as an attempt to reclaim the territories of his empire for 'Rome', but by re-labelling Charlemagne's realm rather than by militarily conquering them. It's worth pointing out that the idea of Charlemagne as a Roman emperor wasn't all that ridiculous - the Ostrogothic rulers of Italy in the 6th century, the Vandal rulers of 5th-century North Africa and the Visigothic rulers of Aquitaine at the same time all took on, to some degree, the titles and trappings of the Roman state, and it's largely down to Justinian painting his invasion of their territory as a 'reconquest' that we normally reject these claims today.

I know there are some that like to trace the Holy Roman Empire back to Charlemagne, but he wasn't crowned 'emperor of the West', nor 'Roman emperor', but simply crowned emperor by the pope - a novelty in itself. Later this would be connected to the infamous Donatio Constantini in order to further buttress papal authority. Eastern Rome of course knew this was a legal novelty (and not founded in Roman law), but they relatively quickly came to terms with it. The lack of a male Byzantine emperor may have had something to do with it. Of course Eastern Roman emperors were crowned, but not by the pope, obviously, and the initiative lay with the crownee, not with the patriarch. Usually anyway.